Sindice Beta 1 index

The Sindice Beta 1 index is now online.

Apart from the exciting geek wizardries (e.g. the crawling, the reasoning and the indexing are now all performed in pipelined Hadoop jobs), there are plenty of interesting new feature to play with:

• Much improved support for free text queries. Great improvements in the ranking of the results
• Much improved support for structured queries: ask for documents where a value appears specifically at certain properties. Examples: “self confessed researchers” or “who claims to knows Richard“?
• Mixed filtering operations allow restrictions on datasets or classes (e.g. try Washington as a person)
• Microformats! Supports for plenty of new microformats has been added and previous support improved.
• Pings are working fine, so anything pinged to us will show just after a short while.

Please notice, however, that Sindice results are not per se “answers” but instead they’re pointers to documents which should contain the answer you seek (which is on the other hand the strong point of SWSE).

How to turn them into answers? 2 ways:

a) Process the results from your applications. See examples in Java, Ruby and PHP here. This will not only get you the piece of information that you need but will also naturally filter out the possibly non relevant document returned (as Sindice query expressivity is necessarely more limited than that of full SPARQL).You can also process Microformats directly in RDF, just access our cached-reasoned-RDF version of it.

b) Bug us to improve and provide the functionality you need as readily consumable API such as e.g. our Sindice Sioc API (which nicely returns a JSON object, no further processing needed).

Sorry for some issues on the visualization end still not working (e.g. visualization of most microformats) but the to see the data, all you really have to do is hit that “cache” button and you’ll see the bare triple, which is all you wanted anyway right? . Neat visualization will come.

Also some datasets are still missing; just watch the number of RDF sources grow as more large datasets offering semantic sitemaps are indexed into the index.

What to say? We are much looking forward to help you implement your cool web of data applications and enhancements. Just drop us a message here and we’ll be right there with you.